Richmond has some of the worst air in the state. Our reporting aims to understand why.

On a Tuesday night last December, dozens of concerned and frustrated people filed into a special Richmond City Council meeting to complain and demand answers from elected officials about a foul stench — likely caused by a dangerous spike in hydrogen sulfide emissions from the city’s wastewater treatment facility— that was causing people living in the surrounding neighborhoods to feel nauseated.

Only weeks before, on Nov. 27, 2023, many of the same residents were alarmed when a flaring episode at the Chevron refinery— a deliberate release to burn off excess gas — caused clouds of black smoke to plume above their homes for 12 hours. It was one of dozens of flaring incidents at the refinery in 2023. More than 100 have been reported to the Bay Area air district since 2018. 

Much has been studied and written about air pollution and its impacts in Richmond, a city nestled between two major interstates and shaped by more than a century of heavy industry, with an active port and railways. In 2017, state regulators identified the Richmond-San Pablo area as one of the 17 places in California most adversely affected by air pollution. And, according to a 2020 Bay Area Air Quality Management District report, people living here experience cardiovascular disease at higher rates, visit the emergency room due to asthma more often, and have shorter life expectancies than elsewhere in Contra Costa County.

Yet a lot of the data and analyses on air pollution exist in private research papers, scientific journals, and government health agency reports that to the average reader can often feel dense, overly technical, and sometimes inaccessible. Complicating matters, there’s disagreement around what conclusions are to be drawn from these studies.

As a result, understanding exactly how polluted Richmond’s air is, and how and where it is affecting the health of residents, isn’t a straightforward proposition. 

But for many residents, direct personal experiences like last winter’s flarings and foul odors have fueled legitimate concerns over air pollution and its local health impacts for generations, with or without a full understanding of the science that backs it up. As one Richmond resident and community organizer, Marisol Cantú, recently told Richmondside: “Maybe [Richmonders] don’t know PM 2.5 (fine particulate matter, a type of air pollution) and what it actually is, but they know asthma.”

How we’ll be reporting on air pollution in Richmond

Over the next several months, we’ll be publishing a series of articles with the aim of answering some of the big questions about air pollution in Richmond, and we will do so in a way that’s digestible for readers. We’ll answer: Just how polluted is Richmond’s air compared to other places? What chemicals are in our air, and where are they coming from? What are the health risks and outcomes associated with these types of pollutants? What is being done about it and what more could be done?

Through our reporting, which will be enhanced with charts, data maps and other visualizations, we hope to help everyday residents and decision-makers better understand the scale, upstream sources, and downstream health impacts of Richmond’s air-quality problems. 

We will examine how grassroots organizing efforts, corporate initiatives, and public policies enacted in recent years are, or aren’t, making a difference. And we will share the experiences of people living in Richmond’s most impacted neighborhoods.

To help ensure residents are aware of this work, we plan to mail informational postcards in English and Spanish to homes in neighborhoods shown to have the highest levels of air pollution. We’ll do that with the goal of surveying residents who might not be Richmondside readers yet in an effort to share information and to better understand how people are being affected.

Richmond has a rich history of community organizing around environmental concerns, and in recent years these efforts have helped spur public support for stronger environmental regulations and clean-air initiatives through new legislation at the regional and state level, such as AB 617. Our reporting will also seek to explain how these efforts are making a difference: Are they moving the needle on reducing pollution and improving public health?

Experienced health journalist leading the reporting

Leading this reporting for Richmondside is Brian Krans, a longtime Cityside contributor who lives in Richmond. Krans brings two decades of journalism experience to the project, much of it in local news. He was a senior writer at healthline.com, where he gained experience poring over medical research papers. He’s also reported on health issues in Oakland, from his coverage of the soda tax for Oakland North while at UC Berkeley to his on-the-ground reporting during the height of the pandemic for The Oaklandside. Krans has helped edit youth voices for the local Contra Costa Pulse (formerly Richmond Pulse) newspaper and website. He is also a general assignment reporter for KQED. Krans lives in the North and East neighborhood with his wife and daughter.

“I feel privileged to use my experience as a health and investigative reporter working for Richmondside to help my neighbors better understand air quality issues that may impact their families’ health,” said Krans, “especially as decades of activism are culminating in work to reduce air pollution.”

For his first story, which we published today, Krans combed through a phone-book-sized stack of public-health documents and scientific research papers to explain what exactly is in Richmond’s air that poses a health risk and where it’s coming from. The article is complemented by an immersive flyover map of Richmond’s major air pollution sources created by Cityside’s director of products and platforms, Francisco Nieto.

Our journalism series on air pollution in Richmond is being supported by the Data-Driven Reporting Project, a partnership between the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and the Google News Initiative, which seeks to help local news organizations and freelance journalists with investigative, document and data-focused stories.